Diane Farris Gallery

The English word “photographer” comes from two Greek words that together can be translated literally as “someone who writes with light.” By comparison, the Modern Greek word for painter, zographos, comes from two Greek words that can be translated “someone who writes with life.” This first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Mary Balomenos, a Canadian painter of Greek ancestry who has been working in Paris for the last eight years, takes its strength from tensions the artist is able to bring forth through a variety of abstract and figurative forms, rendered, for the most part, in earth tones and charcoal. These tensions may be located, for the purposes of talking about her work, by asking, What would it mean to write with life, and how would this differ from writing with light?

Here, writing, or graphos, takes on its earlier, Greek meaning to include painting and drawing. One of